The Wild Ass's Skin

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘“Now you are a man, my son,” he said. “What I am doing is simple and just and there is no need to thank me for it. If I have any right to your gratitude, Raphael,” he went on quietly, but in a tone that was full of dignity, “it is for having preserved your youth from the ills that beset all young people in Paris. From now on you and I shall be friends. In a year’s time you will become a Doctor of Law. You have, not without some frustrations and privation, acquired the solid knowledge and love of work so necessary to men called to conduct affairs of state. I hope you understand me, Raphael? I don’t want to make you into a barrister, nor a solicitor, but a statesman who will bring glory to our poor house. Till tomorrow!” he added, dismissing me with an enigmatic gesture.

  ‘From that day on my father told me of his plans and confided in me utterly. I was an only child and had lost my mother ten years earlier. Before that, my father, head of an ancient family in the Auvergne now more or less forgotten, and not happy with the idea of ploughing the land and wearing a sword, had come to Paris to do battle with the devil. He was endowed with that acumen that makes men from the South of France, if they are also energetic, so superior, and had managed without undue help or backing to land a position at the very centre of power. The Revolution rapidly reversed his fortunes; but he had succeeded in marrying the heiress of a noble family and under the Empire had thought he was about to restore our family to its former glory. The Restoration, which gave back a considerable amount of property to my mother, ruined my father. Having formerly bought several estates given by the emperor to his generals in foreign lands, he fought for ten years with liquidators and diplomats in the Prussian and Bavarian courts in order to maintain his disputed possession of these unfortunate inheritances.

  ‘My father threw me into the inextricable labyrinth of this vast lawsuit on which our future depended. We could be made to refund the revenues from this estate as well as the earnings from certain sales of wood made between 1814 and 1816. In that case my mother’s money would scarcely have been enough to save the honour of our name. So the very day my father appeared in some sense to have emancipated me, I fell under the most hateful of yokes. I had to fight as if on a battlefield, work night and day, go and visit politicians, try to guess their allegiances, attempt to interest them in our plight, make up to them, their wives, their servants, their dogs, and disguise this odious job with a veneer of suavity and pleasant jokes. I understood why my father’s face was so lined by worries.

  ‘For about a year, then, I appeared to be leading the life of a man of the world. But behind this frivolous behaviour and my eagerness to form ties with influential relatives or people who could be useful to us, lay an enormous labour. My distractions were still pleas for the defence and my conversations were statements and reports. Until that point I had been virtuous because of the impossibility of indulging my youthful passions; but fearing now to cause my father’s or my own ruin by some negligence, I became a despot to myself and I did not dare indulge in the smallest pleasure or expense. When we are young, when the harshness of living in society has not yet plucked from us that delicate flower of feeling, that freshness in our ideas, that noble purity of conscience which never allows us to compromise with evil, we feel our duty most keenly. Our honour speaks out loud and we have to listen. We are frank and without guile. That was what I was like at the time. I wanted to justify the trust my father had placed in me. Once it would have thrilled me to steal a paltry sum of money from him; but now that I carried with him the burden of his affairs, his name, his house, I would have secretly made over to him my wealth, my hopes, just as I sacrificed my pleasures for him, and be pleased to make that sacrifice! So when Monsieur de Villèle exhumed, to our particular disadvantage, an imperial decree on forfeitures that would have ruined us, I signed away all my properties, only retaining an island without any value, in the middle of the Loire,* where my mother’s tomb was situated.

  ‘Today perhaps I should be in possession of all the reasonings, prevarications, philosophical, philanthropic, and political arguments that would dispense me from committing what my lawyer called a folly. But at twenty-one we are, I repeat, all generosity, all warmth, all love. The tears I saw in my father’s eyes were then for me the finest of inheritances and the memory of those tears has often consoled me in my poverty. Ten months after paying his creditors my father died of grief; he adored me and he had ruined me. This idea was the death of him. In 1826, at the age of twenty-two, towards the end of autumn, I, the sole mourner, followed the coffin of my first friend, my father. Few young men have found themselves alone with their thoughts behind a hearse, in Paris, at a loss, without future or fortune. Orphans taken in by charitable institutions at least have the battlefield to look forward to, the state or the king’s attorney for foster-father, a poorhouse where they can lay their head. As for me, I had nothing at all! Three months later a liquidator gave me eleven hundred and twelve francs, the net amount in cash from my father’s estates. Our creditors had forced me to sell our furniture. Accustomed from my youth to believe the luxurious objects with which I was surrounded to be of great value, I could not but express surprise at this minuscule balance.

  ‘“Oh,” said the liquidator, “all that stuff was very rococo.”*

  ‘That terrifying word put paid to all my childhood’s beliefs and stripped me of my first illusions, the dearest of all. My fortune was summed up by a bill of sale, my future lay in a linen bag that contained eleven hundred and twelve francs, Society appeared before me in the person of an auctioneer’s attendant, who addressed me with his hat on. A servant, Jonathas, who was fond of me and to whom my mother had left an annuity of four hundred francs, said to me as we left the house from which in childhood I had so often driven out blithely in a carriage:

  ‘“Be careful with your money, Monsieur Raphael!” He was in tears, the poor man.’

  * * *

  ‘These, my dear Émile, are the events that determined my fate, formed my outlook on life, and placed me, still a young man, in the falsest of all social situations,’ said Raphael after a pause. ‘I was attached by family ties, albeit not very close ones, to some rich houses which my pride would have prevented me from entering, even if scorn and indifference had not already closed their doors to me. Although I had relatives among some very influential people who were generous in their protection of strangers, I had neither parent nor guardian; through the continual checking of my impulses that I had been subjected to in my upbringing, I had become very inward-looking. Though I was open-hearted and spontaneous in my nature, I must have seemed cold and secretive. The despotic rule of my father had robbed me of all self-confidence. I was timid and ill-at-ease, I did not believe what I said could have any effect whatsoever, I did not like myself, I thought I was ugly, I was ashamed with the way I looked.

  ‘In spite of the inner voice which should encourage men of talent in their struggles and which said to me: “Courage! Forward!”; in spite of the sudden revelations of my latent power when I was by myself; in spite of the hope which filled me when I compared the new works admired by the public with the ones flitting through my brain, I lacked self-confidence, as a child does. I was a prey to excessive ambition, I believed myself destined for greatness, yet felt I was a nobody. I needed the companionship of men, yet had no friends. I had to make my way in the world, and yet I remained quite alone, not so much fearful as full of shame. During the year when I was being propelled by my father into the whirlpool of high society I arrived there with an innocent heart and an eager mind. Like all youngsters I secretly aspired to exciting love-affairs.

  ‘Among the young people of my age, I came across a set of braggarts who went around with their noses in the air, uttering inanities, sitting down nonchalantly next to what seemed to me the most awei-nspiring women, making impertinent remarks to them, gnawing at the ends of their canes, striking attitudes, saying the prettiest of women were easy, putting, or pretending they had put, their heads on every pillow, giving the impressio
n they could take or leave their pleasures, considering virtuous and chaste women theirs for the asking and fit to be conquered by a single word, the slightest move, the first bold glance! I declare to you in all conscience that achieving power or great fame in the literary world seemed to me less difficult than success with a young, witty, and graceful woman of rank. So I found my troubled sentiments, my feelings, my ideals in conflict with the maxims of society. I was bold, but only in my inner self, not in my behaviour. I learned later that women don’t want to be begged for their favours. I have seen many whom I worshipped from afar, to whom I would have given a staunch heart, a soul they could tear apart if they chose, an energy that did not flinch from sacrifice or torture, but they belonged to fools I would not have wanted even as my porter. How many times, tongue-tied, unmoving, have I not admired the woman of my dreams, appearing suddenly in a ballroom; whereupon, in my mind I devoted my whole life to everlasting kisses, pinned all my hopes on a glance from her, and ecstatically offered her the love of a naive young man almost inviting infidelity. There were times when I should have given my life for one single night.

  ‘So then, never finding any ear into which I could pour my impassioned words, or eyes on which my own could rest, or a heart for my heart, I lived in all the torments of a self-devouring, impotent energy, either through lack of opportunity, or through shyness or inexperience. Perhaps I despaired of making myself understood, or trembled that I might be understood only too well. And yet a storm was brewing inside me at each polite glance in my direction. In spite of my promptness in interpreting this look or these apparently affectionate words as a tender sign of interest, I never dared either speak or hold my tongue at the crucial moment. The strength of my feelings rendered my words insignificant, and I remained tongue-tied and stupid. No doubt I was too naive for the artifices of a society that lived in the limelight, that expressed all its ideas in clichés or in modish phrases. I was never able to speak and say nothing or say nothing while I was speaking. In short, with fires burning in my heart, the kind of heart desired by women, and forever in the state of exaltation they all long for and having the passion fools boast about, I was treated by all women with a treacherous cruelty. So I naively admired the heroes of the salons when they boasted about their triumphs, without ever suspecting that they lied. No doubt it was my own fault for desiring a true love, wishing to find in the heart of a frivolous, flirtatious woman, greedy for luxury and drunk on vanity, the great passion, the ocean which was raging so tempestuously in my own heart. Oh, to feel oneself born to love and to make a woman truly happy, and not to have found anyone, not even a brave and noble Marceline* or an elderly marquise! To carry all these treasures within me and not to meet a young person, some interested girl, to show them off to. I have often felt like killing myself in despair.’

  ‘We are very tragic this evening!’ cried Émile.

  ‘Kindly allow me to be the judge of my own life,’ replied Raphael. ‘If your friendship is not strong enough to listen to my elegies, if you can’t give me the benefit of half an hour’s boredom, go to sleep! But don’t then ask me to account for my suicide, which growls at me like a beast, raises its ugly head and calls to me—and I respond! To judge a man, at least you must be party to his secret thoughts, to his ills, to his emotions; not to want to know anything about his life except material events, that’s chronology, history fit for fools!’

  The bitter tone in which these words were uttered struck Émile so forcibly that from that moment on he gave all his attention to Raphael, looking at him with a startled air.

  ‘But’, the narrator went on, ‘now, the light which colours these incidents lends them a different aspect. The order of things that I once considered evil has perhaps engendered the fine faculties that I later became proud of. The philosophical curiosity, excessive work, love of reading which from the age of seven until my entry into the world have constantly occupied my life, may have endowed me with the faculty with which, if I am to believe you, I can express my ideas and stride forth through the vast field of human knowledge. The solitude to which I was condemned, the habit of suppressing my feelings and internalizing my emotions—have they not endowed me with the ability to compare and meditate? And by not losing my soul to the irritants of a society that weakens the finest sensibility and reduces it to shreds, have I perhaps concentrated my mind so that it has become the perfect organ of a will higher than the hunger of passion?

  ‘Misunderstood by women, I remember observing them with the sagacity of love disdained. Now I see that the sincerity of my character must have annoyed them! Perhaps women want one to be a little hypocritical? I who am by turns, within the same hour, both man and boy, frivolous and reflective, without prejudice and riddled with superstitions, am often as feminine as they are. Must they not have taken my naivety for cynicism, and supposed the very purity of my mind to be a mark of libertinage? My intellect spelled boredom, my female passivity, weakness. This excessive restlessness of the imagination, the curse of poets, no doubt made them judge me to be someone incapable of love, inconstant in my ideas, lacking in energy. A fool when tongue-tied, perhaps I frightened them away when I made an effort to please them. And so women condemned me. I accepted with tears and sadness the verdict of the world. But this pain had its effect. I wanted to take my revenge on society, I wanted to possess the souls of all women by the superior force of my intellect and see all eyes fixed on me when my name was announced by a servant at the door to a salon. I set myself up as a great man. From childhood on I had tapped my forehead and said, like André de Chénier,* “There is something in here!” I thought I could feel within me an idea to express, a system to establish, a piece of scientific knowledge to expound.

  ‘Oh my dear Émile! Today, barely twenty-six and certain to die unknown, without ever having been the lover of the woman I dreamed of possessing, let me tell you about my foolish behaviour! Have we not all more or less taken our desires for realities? Ah, I should not want as friend a young man who in his dreams had never adorned his head with laurels, placed himself on some pedestal, or attracted compliant mistresses. I have often myself been a general or an emperor; I have been Byron—and no one. After dancing on the summit of human achievements I perceived that all mountains were still there to be climbed, all difficulties still to be overcome.

  ‘The huge self-confidence that was boiling up in me, this sublime belief in my destiny, that was my salvation. Perhaps it turns into genius, as long as a man does not allow his soul to be torn apart by contact with things, like a sheep leaving its wool on the thorn hedges it passes through. I wanted to cover myself with glory, working in silence for the mistress I was hoping to have one day. All women were epitomized in a single one and I expected to meet this woman in the first that caught my eye; but since I thought each a queen, they all, in queenly fashion, had necessarily to make the first move towards their lovers, and come and meet me halfway, miserable, poor, and timid as I was. Oh, I had so much gratitude, not to mention love, in my heart for the one who might possibly take pity on me, that I would have adored her till my dying day.

  ‘A little later my observations taught me some cruel truths. So, my dear Émile, I risked living on my own for ever. Women tend, for some unknown inclination in their nature, to see in a man of talent nothing but his faults, and in a fool only his qualities; they feel great sympathy for the qualities of a fool for they are a perpetual flattery of their own faults, whereas the superior man does not offer them enough delights to compensate for his imperfections. Talent is an intermittent fever, no woman is in the least anxious to share its ills. They all want to find things in their lovers that satisfy their vanity. It is themselves they love in us! A poor, proud, artistic man, endowed with the ability to be creative, is he not armed with a wounding egotism? He is surrounded by a kind of whirlpool of thoughts in which he envelopes everything, even his mistress who has to follow his changing moods.

  ‘A woman who is adored, can she believe in the love of such a man?
Will she go and seek it out? Such a lover does not have the leisure to abandon himself on some divan to those ridiculous displays of sensibility which women are so keen on and which are used by false, insensitive men to make a conquest. He needs time for his work, so why would he waste it dressing up and demeaning himself like that? Though ready to give up my life at a moment’s notice, I would not have cheapened it by frittering it away. In short, there is something petty and mean in the stratagems of a stockbroker running errands for a pale and simpering woman that inspires horror in the artist.

  ‘Love in the abstract is not enough for a poor but great man; he requires total devotion. The little creatures who spend their lives trying on cashmere shawls or who make themselves into mannequins are not capable of devotion; they demand it, but see in love only the pleasure of ordering someone about, not that of obeying. The true bride of the heart in flesh and blood will allow herself to be trailed around from place to place after the man in whom her life, her strength, her glory, and her happiness reside. Superior men need oriental women whose only thought is the study of their needs. For, to these men, unhappiness resides in the discrepancy between their desires and their means of satisfying them.

  ‘And I, who thought myself a man of genius, fell for these little coquettes! Cherishing such unconventional ideas, having the ambition to climb to heaven without a ladder, having wealth which could buy me nothing, armed with a wide-ranging knowledge which overburdened my memory and which I had not yet properly considered or assimilated; finding myself fatherless, friendless, alone in the middle of a most terrible wilderness, a desert of paved streets, a desert that was animated, thinking, alive, where everything was worse than hostile, it was cold and indifferent! What I resolved to do was natural, if a little crazy; in it lay something impossible, which gave me strength. It was a kind of wager that I made with myself where I was both the gambler and the stakes. This was my plan: